Best 307 quotes of Nathaniel Hawthorne on MyQuotes

Nathaniel Hawthorne

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Accuracy is twin brother to honesty, and inaccuracy to dishonesty.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    A few feathery flakes are scattered widely through the air, and hover downward with uncertain flight, now almost alighting on the earth, now whirled again aloft into remote regions of the atmosphere.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    A grave, wherever found, preaches a short and pithy sermon to the soul.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    A human spirit may find no insufficiency of food fit for it, even in the Custom House.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    A long time ago, in a town with which I used to be familiarly acquainted, there dwelt an elderly person of grim aspect, known by the name and title of Doctor Grimshawe, whose household consisted of a remarkably pretty and vivacious boy, and a perfect rosebud of a girl, two or three years younger than he, and an old maid of all work, of strangely mixed breed, crusty in temper and wonderfully sluttish in attire.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    A man--poet, prophet, or whatever be may be--readily persuades himself of his right to all the worship that is voluntarily tendered.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    America is now wholly given over to a d--d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash - and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed. What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of the Lamplighter, and other books neither better nor worse? - worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by 100,000.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world , individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. (Wakefield)

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    ...and we have so far improved upon the custom of Adam and Eve, that we generally furnish forth our feasts with a portion of some delicate calf or lamb, whose unspotted innocence entitles them to the happiness of becoming our sustenance.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    And what is more melancholy than the old apple-trees that linger about the spot where once stood a homestead, but where there is now only a ruined chimney rising our of a grassy and weed-grown cellar? They offer their fruit to every wayfarer--apples that are bitter-sweet with the moral of times vicissitude.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    An unhappy gentleman, resolving to wed nothing short of perfection, keeps his heart and hand till both get so old and withered that no tolerable woman will accept them.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Articulate words are a harsh clamor and dissonance. When man arrives at his highest perfection, he will again be dumb.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    As a general rule, Providence seldom vouchsafes to mortals any more than just that degree of encouragement which suffices to keep them at a reasonably full exertion of their powers.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    As far as my experience goes, men of genius are fairly gifted with the social qualities; and in this age, there appears to be a fellow-feeling among them, which had not heretofore been developed. As men, they ask nothing better than to be on equal terms with their fellow-men; and as authors, they have thrown aside their proverbial jealousy, and acknowledge a generous brotherhood.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    A singular fact, that, when man is a brute, he is the most sensual and loathsome of all brutes.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    A stale article, if you dip it in a good, warm, sunny smile, will go off better than a fresh one that you've scowled upon.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    As the architecture of a country always follows the earliest structures, American architecture should be a refinement of the log-house. The Egyptian is so of the cavern and the mound; the Chinese, of the tent; the Gothic, of overarching trees; the Greek, of a cabin.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    As the moral gloom of the world overpowers all systematic gaiety, even so was their home of wild mirth made desolate amid the sad forest.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    At almost every step in life we meet with young men from whom we anticipate wonderful things, but of whom, after careful inquiry, we never hear another word. Life certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely on their first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very sober aspect after washing day.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    A throng of bearded men in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and other bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    At no time are people so sedulously careful to keep their trifling appointments, attend to their ordinary occupations, and thus put a commonplace aspect on life, as when conscious of some secret that if suspected would make them look monstrous in the general eye.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    A vast deal of human sympathy runs along the electric line of needlework, stretching from the throne to the wicker chair of the humble seamstress.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats. You may strip off the outer ones without doing much mischief, perhaps none at all ; but you keep taking off one after another, in expectation of coming to the inner nucleus, including the whole value of the matter. It proves, however, that there is no such nucleus, and that chastity is diffused through the whole series of coats, is lessened with the removal of each, and vanishes with the final one which you supposed would introduce you to the hidden pearl.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    A writer of story books! What kind of business in life-what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation-may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Bees are sometimes drowned in the honey which they collectso some writers are lost in their collected learning.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    But this had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    But, irreverently consorting with these grave, reputable, and pious people, these elders of the church, these chaste dames and dewy virgins, there were men of dissolute lives and women of spotted fame, wretches given over to all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes. It was strange to see that the good shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    But she named the infant "Pearl," as being of great price-purchased with all she had-her mother's only treasure!

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the colour to their lifetime; and, still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places — whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest — where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Can man be so age-stricken that no faintest sunshine of his youth may re visit him once a year? It is impossible. The moss on our time-worn mansion brightens into beauty; and the good old pastor, who once dwelt here, renewed his prime and regained his boyhood in the genial breeze of his ninetieth spring. Alas for the worn and heavy soul, if, whether in youth or age, it has outlived its privilege of springtime sprightliness!

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Cannot you conceive that another man may wish well to the world and struggle for its good on some other plan than precisely that which you have laid down?

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections as leaves are to the life of a tree. If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Cupid in these latter times has probably laid aside his bow and arrow, and uses fire-arms -- a pistol -- perhaps a revolver.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes falsehoods, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the gold, and dishonors the baser metal.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Death possesses a good deal, of real estate, namely, the graveyard in every town.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Dream strange things and make them look like truth.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Earth has one angel less and heaven one more, since yesterday.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Easy reading is damn hard writing.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Echo is the voice of a reflection in a mirror.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Every crime destroys more Edens than our own

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Every young sculptor seems to think that he must give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it Eve, Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologize for a lack of decent clothing.

  • By Anonym
    Nathaniel Hawthorne

    Generosity is the flower of justice.